In conventional wireless communication systems for transmission of compressed video information, typically multiple compressed video frames transmitted from a transmitter are buffered at a receiver to overcome wireless channel bandwidth fluctuation, reduce transmission jitter and facilitate error concealment. Such buffering at the receiver may be appropriate for compressed video since the total required memory buffer size to store multiple compressed video frames is small and can be accommodated by available buffer size on typical wireless chips.
However, for uncompressed video information such as high definition (HD) video, typical wireless chips do not include sufficient memory to buffer even a single uncompressed video frame. For example, for a 1080p video format, each video frame comprises active picture information of 1920 rows and 1080 lines, with each pixel having 24 bits, wherein each video frame comprises about 6 Mbytes of video information. Due to the size and cost constraints of millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless chips, usually a receiver with an mmWave wireless chip can buffer only a portion of an uncompressed video frame. Therefore, commonly used error concealment schemes (such as copying information from a previous frame to recover error in a current frame) are not applicable to mmWave wireless chips.
At a 60 GHz frequency band, there is more free space loss than at 2 or 5 GHz since free space loss increases quadratically with frequency. In principle, this higher free space loss can be compensated for using antennas with more pattern directivity while maintaining small antenna dimensions. When such antennas are used, however, obstacles can easily cause a substantial drop of received power and block the channel for several seconds. Conventional solutions such as dynamic beam searching can be used to relieve this blocking effect and reduce the blocking time. However, for uncompressed video streaming applications, due to a very limited available buffer size compared to the very high data rate, such conventional solutions for reducing blocking time still significantly degrade uncompressed video reception quality such as Quality of Service (QoS).